MUFG Bank, Ltd. (MUFG), the Asian Institute of Digital Finance (AIDF), CriAT and iAPPS-FundON jointly announce their involvement in the development of “GreenON”, a digital service that aims to provide greater transparency and accountability of the sustainability efforts of companies within Asia’s food and agricultural sectors.
GreenON is a first-ever digital service in Asia that adopts an evidence-based, data-driven approach to analyse the initiatives of food companies and agri-producers against their sustainability objectives. A “Bottom-up Greenness” (BuG) score is then established and can be used to evaluate whether the project has met its environmental targets, leveraging data from the ground.
GreenON will interoperate with the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Greenprint platforms to consolidate and share data points to increase awareness of the food and agriculture sectors’ sustainability efforts and better mobilise investment into supporting the regional green ecosystem.
“MUFG’s long-term sustainability commitment has been the driving force behind our constant efforts at improving our ESG business practices in ways that can be demonstrated to both internal and external stakeholders,” commented Mr. Yip Shue Heng, Managing Director, Head of Digital Transformation Office, Asia and Oceania, MUFG Bank. “We are therefore very excited by GreenON’s evidence-based approach in helping our bank purposefully mobilise capital towards the greening of our environment.”
The introduction of a digital platform that provides timely and verifiable sector-specific green data is important given the pressure placed on the environment by the burgeoning global demand for agricultural products, one of the factors causing encroachment into protected forests and peatland.
Whilst there has certainly been a growing commitment from corporations, investors and financial institutions (FIs) to support sustainable projects, the issue of sustainability reporting remains a challenge, making it difficult to accurately track and assess the progress of such initiatives and their impact on the environment.
With GreenON, investors and FIs will be able to better mobilise green capital and ensure that the funds deployed are having the desired effects in protecting the environment and mitigating deforestation, and corporates will be able to back their sustainability objectives with data from the field and simplify their project-level sustainability reporting.
“Agri-food supply chains are vital to modern economies, but without sustainable practices may harm the environment,” said Prof. Duan Jin-Chuan, Executive Director, Asian Institute of Digital Finance, National University of Singapore. “We firmly believe that financing for sustainability of various production units in an agri-food supply chain is achievable through evidence-based greenness scores coupled with a bottom-up consistent aggregation.”
Source: MUFG Bank